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If aliens wanted us dead, they’d just use a Relativistic Kill Vehicle or something similar (a really big rock moving really fast). In that case, the gun I’d use would probably some sort of array of beam weapons combined with advanced “brilliant pebbles” and a large detection net to try to track any incomings and cause them to deflect before they could cross Earth’s orbit. We’d have to stage it mostly at the edge of the solar system to give us enough time.

It’d be expensive, but we could control costs by having the bulk of manufacturing using asteroid mining, rather than lifting it from the Earth’s surface.

Given that we haven’t been wiped out by a fast moving rock just yet, I’d say that means we should look at either the aliens having a different plan, or some other reason for these aerial phenomena.

There’s far easier to extract materials in the belt than anything to be found on earth. Realistically, anybody capable of moving start to star in a reasonable time frame would have little if any interest in Earth. We just aren’t that unique.

That’s what I was looking for — if they have interstellar travel, the only thing they could get from us would be native curious — baskets, rugs, video games, and other technological curios. Languages and customs might be interesting to professors.

Even that tired trope of science fiction “they want our water” is bogus, since we’ve now seen clear evidence of *massive* amounts of free H2O in the cosmos.

I’m looking at it now as a simple signal-to-noise ratio thing, our planetary electromagnetic radiation output is so small against a universe backdrop so *full* of noise sources that we are comfortably ‘smothered’ and invisible.

The only human-created electromagnetic radiation that could possibly be detected at a distance would be our exo-atmospheiric nuclear tests, as those impulses have a well-defined shape. A *very* fast rise-time and a very short duration.

Now, I *suppose* an alien civilization could have set up automated listening posts in galaxies programmed to listen for a nuclear detonation, but the sheer time it would take at the speed of light means we have a *long* time before the aliens even know we’re here.

(*Note* All bets are off if we discover a black obelisk during our interplanetary exploration missions…)

“Given that we haven’t been wiped out by a fast moving rock just yet.” That’s because we have not been detected. The universe is not quiet because our solar system is unique. I hope like hell we get past the light speed issue before the sun explodes. If light speed is the limit, then I hope some humans manage to make a run for it. How knows, we may get lucky and invent interstellar travel before the anyone else, but I’m not betting on it.

Google Alcubierre drive. Yes it’s a thing. No we don’t know how to build it just yet.

Realistically, the logistics of deep space industry make extracting anything you don’t absolutely need from a planetary gravity well a losing proposition. From an energy standpoint, it’s much easier to get things from random rocks floating in space than to mine them and bring them up from a planetary gravity well.

Maybe not. If they can move ore between stars that cheaply, a planet’s gravity well isn’t much of an impediment. If need be, they could build smelters and refineries on the ground to reduce the dead weight. They’d probably do that in their mining ships anyway.

Why? The existence of the resources to manufacture such a drive would imply a post-scarcity society. Why go to war over interstellar distances when you can pick a star at random and wind up with enough resources to do more or less anything you want?

Who said anything about war. At that level of tech, you have the situation were you either you produce self replicating machines that will kill off anyone before they make it to the stars, or eventually someone makes it to the stars who is willing to kill off everyone else.

while we’re talking vehicle mounted, why not a 20mm Vulcan? They devastated everything in the old DC3 spookies in ‘Nam. They only went up in weapon size to increase the range and standoff distance so the cargo plane wouldn’t take ground fire. That’s why the later versions get the Bofors and the 105, but the gatlings went down to 7.62 cal. They’re for when ground fire is judged to be no threat(correctly or incorrectly), and the larger rounds to say up out of range most of the time.
But, in a vehicle with a driver, even a minigun in .308 should be plenty, even for a Predator. Ungodly amount of firepower. Good vid of Ian from forgotten weapons on the minigun:

Abrams M1 just cause they’d make a funny squish under the tracks. Wait no they look like virgins sooooo blow up dolls that play various turn downs from women. They’ll eventually off themselves mwahahahaha!!!

Absolutely, the aliens already control the elites and the government and by extension the Armed forces of the world. What’s the aliens can’t control is the armed citizens. So until they disarm us the mass invasion is on hold.

Again… the question must be asked… why bother? There is nothing on Earth that they can’t get with a whole lot less trouble in dozens of uninhabited systems within a galactic stone’s trow of Sol. The only reason I can think of an alien civilization to get involved with a bunch of, effectively, pre-space primitives is some sort of cultural uplifting to get us prepared for first contact. Even then, a basic study of human history would show that this would be the exact WORST way to go about it. While I’m not a big fan of Trek (commies in space and all that), the “prime directive” makes perfect sense. Why get involved with a bunch of primitives who are still a hair’s breadth away from throwing fission devices at each other inside their only known biosphere? For a civilization that’s capable of traveling between stars, the cost to benefit analysis just doesn’t make any sense.

The old “humanity, fuck yeah” trope comes to mind.

‘”We poison our air and water to weed out the weak! We set off fission bombs in our only biosphere! We nailed our god to a stick! Don’t fuck with the human race!””

What species capable of interstellar travel would look at that and NOT go… “ok, we’ll come back in a few centuries after they get this bullshit out of their systems”.

you may have hit on the best reason of all-to prevent us from spreading to other places they have their eye on. That said, yeah they can sit back and watch us stagnate technically for another thousand years before this becomes a problem.

No intelligent species would want anything to do with us. We don’t have the where with all to flush out and make the world a safe place from people who care more for greed and power than all of humanity. The whole “alien” thing is just the last phase of a complete take over of all forms of human life; under the guise of protection. The issue of a gun selection is just a fancy thought. The guns will be confiscated door by door, human life will be “chipped” like farm animals; all life will be controlled 24/7 or destroyed. It was all for nothing. God warned us. But we said screw it, and went to the mall.

We’d be so screwed if hostile aliens show up. Best case scenario, we end up like the Native Americans, and that’s only if the invaders show mercy after wiping out most of our population.

The only alien invasion scenario I can think of that allows humans a chance at winning is if aliens scouted our planet with an automated space probe and it has taken tens of thousands of years for the signal from that probe to reach them, then tens of thousands of years more for their colonization ships to arrive, only to discover that an indigenous civilization with nuclear weapons has all the prime real estate. Since they’re not an invasion force, they would have defensive weapons at most. They could still drop big rocks on us from orbit, but they would want to preserve the environment and we would see it coming. Or, they could engineer a plague to wipe us out, but it would take time for them to learn about our physiology, and given enough time, we could do the same to them. If they have nanomachines that they could program to kill us all, we’re dead, but we could have a deadman switch to launch all our WMDs and ruin the planet for them. If they couldn’t negotiate for land to settle on, then they may have to engage us in a ground war to take it.

In that scenario, what firearm I would want would depend on how well armored their ground forces are and how resilient their bodies are to damage. As they aren’t specifically a military force, it is doubtful they would have purpose built combat exoskeletons or drones. They would probably send conscripts equiped with hastily manufactured weapons and armor that could nevertheless be superior to anything we could field. Not knowing anything else about them, I would use an AK since I have the most ammo for it.

Someone has been reading a bit too much Sterling. He’s a great story writer, but his understanding of basic engineering wouldn’t fill a coffee cup. If I have the tech to move from planet to planet, there are far better places in the sol system to get all the resources I could possibly need. (Like the asteroid belt.) Those places also aren’t teeming with pre-space natives willing to put high velocity lead into my hide for no apparent reason.

Yep. Also what’s rarely considered by people without an engineering or astrophysics background is that the ability to travel between planets absolutely implies a corresponding ability to place objects in orbital motion with a degree of precision that our “smart weapon” experts can only dream of.

Everyone says “well, sure, they could drop big rocks on us, but that would destroy everything…” Which is exactly why they wouldn’t drop big rocks. They’ll drop a small tungsten rod at a small fraction of lightspeed through the roof of a building, where the kinetic energy alone will flatten the block. Bunkers? Ha!

Practical space travel requires, by definition, the kind of energy output that can destroy civilizations by accident. If they’re actually trying? We haven’t got a prayer.

Just remember the experience of a similar technological gap elsewhere on this planet. A well thrown rock can kill you just as dead as a multi-million dollar drone. If you’re a space faring civilization, why would you bother with savages stuck at the bottom of their own gravity well? The far easier solution is to set up infrastructure in solar orbit and leave the fuzzy wuzzies to their own stupidity.

On a side note… a relativistic kill vehicle going at 90% of c has a terminal energy equivalent to almost double its mass in antimatter. Mind you, with warp drives (yes, they are a mathematically provable thing), there is no real need to get to anything remotely approaching c. Just dump the exotic matter in the general direction of anything you want dead, and the hard radiation will take care of the rest. Though I do find it interesting that Star Trek adequately described the function of negative mass drives about three decades before the math showed up to prove that, yes, it was possible and would function in 90% the same way as depicted.

I really like the 5.7 cartridge except for one thing (two sort of). The short life span of the brass and their weapons need for that lacquer coating. I only fire my brass three times max before I toss it. I also really wish that we had the option to get a P90 rather than the autosettingless PS90. That gun just screams for full auto.

It was designed for full auto. The standard 50 round stick magazine is a dead giveaway. It was never intended to be a one-shot per target kind of weapon. More of a modernization of the old sub-machine gun concept.

What’s the issue? I’m sure that the government will protect us. It’s not like the next generation of Scot Petersons will wait outside Planet Earth until the aliens kill everyone and commit suicide. Amirite?

No, instead the G will give the aliens voting rights, sanctuary cities and welfare while attempting to punish us for our “Human Privilege.”

Chuck Schumer will demand that the aliens support Israel.

Maxine Waters will remove her James Brown wig to reveal her protective aluminum foil.

Given that our bioheritage gets foggy at about 200,000 years ago and records of civilization go back less than 10,000 years then let’s estimate these aliens are at least 1 million years ahead of us. Rather than take them on with technical or tactical warfare it would be much more prudent to establish yourself with a group that becomes the ruling elite enslaving and controlling the masses to be sold to the aliens for their needs and your profit or pleasure. Just become a communist, socialist or politician.

Taking us out would be insanely easy. Just bombard the handful of oil refineries from space. There’s under 1000 in the world I believe. And you wouldn’t even need to hit them all nor absolutely demolish them. Just a single crude cruise missiles falling from space hitting half of them. We’d run out of oil in weeks and start ripping ourselves apart.

Also pick off all our satellites. Again, insanely easy. And finally if they have time, start dropping bombs on our power plants.

All of this can be done with our level of technology and they’d never have to even encounter any of our militaries. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

I always chuckle inside when movies show the military or SWAT shooting their M4s at a 50 foot tall alien — that’s just gonna piss ’em off! I would say for large aliens I’d like to start with a .50 BMG. For mid-size give me an AR-10 with 18″ barrel. For man size, give me an AR-15 in 5.56/.223 Rem. with 16 or 18″ barrel. Shooting the right bullet helps harness the energy of the high velocity, small bullet.

The only reason extraterrestrial aliens (if real) would not just blast the planet with kinetic weapons is if atmospheric life bearing worlds are valuable. Maybe terraforming costs too much or takes too long? They’d have to use some sort of targeted biologic, robotic weapon system or put their version of boots on ground.

…Well, If your following real UFO lore…Then there are many species according to the MUFON /UFO lore research people…Some sort of friendly…Others NOT so much…What main reason would our little planet be able to offer hostile aliens…The most dominant wealth here would be “slave labor”in the form of aggressive “Killer monkeys=Humans…”A very rich resource indeed….And,to say that your alien species has mastered the ability to travel interstellar;and intergalactic like…To say THEY might have a few tricks up THEIR sleeves might be an understatement….If you can travel a “hyper-velocities, bend space and time to YOUR will! ” “Manipulate some form of Faster Than Travel, which we have zero understanding of…(Re: UFO lore =Portal holes, vortex, Space Warps, Inter-dimensional travel…) It would possible mean we would be in some trouble…Like Cortez vs Aztecs….Or like , Portuguese slave Traders versus African monarchy….Or, like… European Invaders versus Native Americans…We would Probably be faced with weapons or Technology that it would appear to us like MAGIC! Or, NO technology at all… something tensive, like metaphysical, psychic weapons, mind control, excetera. For we would be in real trouble then… You might as well just save that last bullet for yourself…Unless your ready for slave labor, or how much your taste like chicken…A horrible thought….Not quite the cuddly ET idea from Steven Spielberg… oh well…. could be worse. could be the Apocalypse and the second coming…And judging and wiping out mankind…Then that would become a religious and metaphysical encounter…

H.G. Wells sucked at biochemistry. Smallpox wouldn’t do anything to a common household dog, much less something evolved in a completely different biosphere. Just the idea of dextro or levo amino acids gives us a 50/50 chance of our biologies being completely incompatible outside of base materials like water and carbon. That’s assuming the aliens in question are even carbon based. (High probability given the chemical nature of carbon and it’s relative lack of scarcity in this evolutionary stage of the galaxy, but still.) If the aliens in question are, for example, silicon based, none of the bio-chemistry we know would make sense. A good example can be found right here on Earth with extremophiles. Hell, even common crabs use coper instead of iron as an oxygen carrier and they evolved in the same biosphere we did.

That’s completely setting aside the energy penalties of getting in and out of our gravity well, much less the ones involved in interstellar travel. Even theoretically possible warp drives require several orders of magnitude more energy than we have produced in the history of our civilization. The idea that somebody capable of generating that much energy would come pick a fight with another civilization (no matter how primitive) over the scarce resources bound up at the bottom of our planetary gravity well is absurd. Anything you can find on Earth, you can find far more readily in any of dozens of uninhabited solar systems all over this portion of the galaxy. Hell, even our own asteroid belt would provide a veritable banquet of resources comparing to extracting those same resources from a planetary body with Earth’s gravity well. The resources between Mars and Jupiter are already subdivided into nice and easily processable chunks. The only reason we’re not using them for space construction is that we lack the energy to get to them.

If we ever develop practical energy generation systems useful for interplanetary flight, we would be a practically post-scarcity society. An entire planet’s worth of resources is just floating around in the orbit between Mars and Jupiter ripe for the taking. Orbital smelting is absurdly easy even with our tech base. Just get the rock in question to somewhere between the orbit of Venus and Mercury and use solar mirrors to heat it. Then apply a little angular momentum and the rock melts into a spin-separated “onion” of various materials that can be peeled off in order of density. This would be child’s play for a civilization capable of developing a functional interstellar “warp” drive. I mean seriously, WE can almost do it. All we would need is a good portable power generator and some way to get things into solar orbit without bankrupting entire nations. (Chemical rockets ain’t gonna do it.)

Everybody knows that the Aliens want earths most valuable resources…
It’s women and the liquid water on its surface
Tough to know what to use
The biggest guns we have
.308 Gatling guns, .50 cal machine guns, 20 mm cannons, recoillles rifles
All mounted on pickup trucks as
“ technicals”

Imagine, if you will, the leader of the fifth invader force speaking to the commander in chief…

“They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?!?”

“There’s no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars.”

“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact!”

“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines!”

“That’s ridiculous! How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat?”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they’re made out of meat.”

“Maybe they’re like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage?”

“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?

“Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside?”

“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”

“No brain?”

“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat!”

“So… what does the thinking?”

“You’re not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

“Thinking meat?!? You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat?”

“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Living meat! Dreaming meat! The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?!?”

“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”

“Finally! Yes! They are indeed made out of meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”

“So what does the meat have in mind?”

“First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual.”

“We’re supposed to talk to meat?”

“That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?’ That sort of thing.”

“They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”

“Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”

“I thought you just told me they used radio.”

“They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds! You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air thorough their meat.”

“Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”

“Officially or unofficially?”

“Both.”

“Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favour. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”

“I was hoping you would say that.”

“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”

“I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say?” ‘Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”

“Just the one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space, which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”

“So we just pretend there’s no one home in this sector.”

“That’s it.”

“Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”

“They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”

“A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”

“And we can mark this sector unoccupied.”

“Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”

“Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen-core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”

“They always come around.”

“And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone!”

Any life form capable of practical interstellar travel is also capable of dominating us in a way that the old taking candy from a baby analogy is inadequate. If aliens come, hope they’re friendly. If they’re not, mass suicide.

Please help save our 2nd Amendment rights. The Whitehouse.gov petition web site has a lot of pro-2nd Amendment petitions that need people to view and sign if possible. Look at these and decide which to sign. There are too many to link here.